Sovereign borrowers

Sovereign borrowers

Foreign exchange

Just which place could Sir David Walker have been talking about when he described a country as "Wogga Wogga"?

The word from Paris is that BNP Paribas chairman and CEO Michel Pébéreau is more than a little distracted from his favourite pastime of reading science-fiction novels.

Sovereign borrowers

Fund management

As investors cut back on corporate exposure, high-quality issuers are scooping up funding. Smaller ones can satisfy their needs with many bite-size deals rather than a few jumbos.

The gold price has risen spectacularly in the past year but it is not clear that this buoyancy can be maintained, particularly as investment demand has far exceeded any increase in purchases by manufacturers.

Perhaps he'd had a bad night's sleep. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue. Or perhaps the man who told us last June that we needed to buck up our standards in the wake of the corporate crises in the US simply wanted to tell the truth.

The next battle in the war for survival in US exchange-traded futures is about to begin, and it looks set to be much more cut-throat than before. The Board of Trade and the Merc, once seemingly set for extinction, have been reborn as fierce competitors. They must continue to evolve.

If equity research is quarantined from sales, will institutional investors feel the pinch? Many feign indifference to the crackdown, which was partly triggered by their own apathy. If pressed, though, they admit new structures could be costly and fundamentally change the way they do business.

Romania's publicity-friendly tourism minister, Dan Matei Agathon, is looking to give a lift to investment in the state-sponsored Dracula Park - a tourist trap inspired by the vampire. He plans to start trading Dracula Park shares on the Rasdaq exchange this month.

Issuer: Tyco InternationalSize: $.4.5 billion 144a convertible bondBookrunners: Morgan Stanley, Banc of America Securities, Citigroup

New business development executive, JPMorgan Investor Services

Sovereign borrowers

The AKP’s hefty majority in Turkey’s November elections looked promising but indecision has taken a hold on the new government, not least in its commitment to the discipline required by the IMF.

Amid the corporate credit meltdowns of recent months even the most highly rated of frequent issuers have been forced to defend their funding strategies and the composition of their balance sheets. GE Capital is a prime example. The financial services company has always been proud of its triple-A rating but it has been less keen in the past to demonstrate to the market and the rating agencies why it should still hang on to it.

In his first two months in the job, Bernie Dan, chief executive of the Chicago Board of Trade, has made two quick and bold decisions. It was the second that got the most publicity: the announcement to dump the exchange's joint venture with Eurex in favour of using the Liffe Connect trading platform.

CEO and president of Shariah Funds Inc